These articles (along with so much else that we have read, watched, witnessed) produce deeper understanding, learning and anger. We can't live in ignorance, in our bubbles. And, we have to sustain the anger because the Pandemic has exposed a rotten global system of exploitation, greed, and natural destruction and, with the vaccine hoarding by the Global South, the vaccine passports that Europe wants to instate, with how heatwaves are burning up parts of the world as we speak, we can't afford to be complacent.
I'm reminded so much of the anger, injustice I felt at the time ebola ravaged West Africa: how the world closed its borders, flights to Liberia and our neighbours. How sensational news was played. How, local cultures were insulted because of the connection to bushmeat. How, the suffering was exacerbated by lack of medical infrastructure in countries where international organisations, in the name of aid and development, have laundered funds to their own pockets, R and Rs, mortgages, compounds, rents, and self-awarding stories of glory.
So read!
1) The Permanent Pandemic by Aseem Shrivastava and Rupert Read in Open Magazine, 2 Jul 2021. The main question they ask is Is a post-Covid world possible?
I like how the authors state up front:
This piece is about the profound danger we have exposed ourselves to by turning against nature, and by turning tech and economics into pseudo-gods. It concerns how our globalising civilisation systematically creates the kind of risk that we have suffered grievously from over the last year. Whether by the lack of humility implicit in constructing deadly viruses in labs, or by the lack of humility explicit in destroying ecosystems, artificialising much of the earth and wreaking climate-havoc, we are manifesting a mode of being that is incompatible with safety and with the richness of long species life.
And, this is a recurring commentary /analysis: that the reason viruses are jumping from animals to human is that we are encroaching on their habitats, that we have felled down millions of trees, destroyed forests to make commercial farms, that we have destroyed the earth mining it and, trade wild animals illegally, trade mass produced livestock in millions , that of course, viruses will jump from animals to humans.
It's very simple, rather than launching into attacks against China:
After all, every creature, even a virus that comes alive only in a living cellular environment, longs to thrive by reproducing itself. Removed forcibly from its customary habitat, it would surely look for a new home. The current pandemic may be part of the rapidly growing price of the unsparingly triumphalist modernisation of the world.
So, the authors say:
Our fundamental contention is that you have to choose: you can have a relatively secure, relocalised world, or you can have pandemics in a world of sporadic restless ‘growth’. What you can’t have is our growthist, technophilic, materialistic, economically globalised system and be relatively free of the risk of pandemics.
The article goes through these points:
1) "First, let us look at the destruction of habitats around the earth in the global age."
2) "Second, let us consider the rapid growth of movement of people and goods around the world in the global era."
3) "Third, there has been a tremendous growth of international animal trading with the advent of the latest phase of globalisation."
4) "Fourth, scarcely secondary is the public health danger posed by the industrial mass production of meat through animal farming and the slaughterhouses."
5) "Fifth, let us further consider dietary habits in a globalised world."
2) The Pandemic, Southern Urbanisms and Collective Life by Gautam Bhan, Teresa Caldeira, Kelly Gillespie, and AbdouMaliq Simone, August 3, 2020 in Society and Space.
This piece really struck me: how is social distancing possible in slums? In tiny cramped apartments? How can you lockdown poor people? How would poor children take online classes? How do we enforce lockdowns in urban centres in the Global South?
The authors say we have to imagine collective life in these urban spaces, not the neat individual units in the Global North when designing COVID19 policy/measures :
What would this reading of collective life, of density as sociality, say about the lockdown? When read from this lens, any pandemic response capable of working in the context of southern urban conditions would have to search for a relevant scale of isolation and a notion of ‘distancing’ that retained the existing arrangements of the urban majority. Homes, offices, firms and enterprises would not then be the vocabulary of a response. Instead, a wider geography and social imaginary would be at play – the street, the community kitchen, the taxi rank, the landfill, the market, the neighborhood watch, the queue for the collection of cash transfers and water supply. New arrangements would become visible and become usable as practices that can travel. Community quarantines, acupunctured into these landscapes by the same hands that built them in the first place, neighborhood watches by residents, isolation of vulnerable residents, such as the elderly, in collective spaces are ideas that emerge from listening to the forms of collective life that already exist and offer lessons in shaping the “afterwards” of COVID-19. Local institutions such as schools, mosques, churches, and community centers are able to repurpose themselves under pandemic conditions because they hold the capacity to read a wide range of local needs and aspirations and thus act as multifaceted nodes of intervention. Additionally, in some neighborhoods, residents are so attuned to the details of household arrangements, occupations, and mobility, so immersed in always paying attention to what everyone is doing, that it seems to make possible an intricate choreography that allows them to adapt to new conditions without explicit organization or deliberation. These examples point to the capacity to be able to move ideas and planning, resources and responses, along the planes of life and arrangement of those most often unthought, disavowed, even as those worlds and experiences form the majority. The fact that Dharavi, one of the densest built forms in the world, is emerging as an example of resilience rather than vulnerability is precisely such a choreography. This is also a kind of density – of inter-connection, of joint histories and ways of coping, of the instincts of collective life – that is a resource perhaps more enduring than monumental responses, technological fixes or large scale institutional action.
3) COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital by Rob Wallace, Alex Liebman, Luis Fernando Chaves and Rodrick Wallace in MONTHLY REVIEW AN INDEPENDENT SOCIALIST MAGAZINE. (May 01, 2020)
This piece was written earlier in 2020. Much of the analysis is the same with The Permanent Pandemic in terms of tracing the devastation of wild habitats, industrial farming, global capital, transfer of viruses, etc.
The authors up front say that healthcare has been commodified and, our preparedness cannot rely on crises but strong social and medical care systems. They recommended:
We need to nationalize hospitals as Spain did in response to the outbreak. We need to supercharge testing in volume and turnaround as Senegal has. We need to socialize pharmaceuticals. We need to enforce maximum protections for medical staff to slow staff decay. We must secure the right to repair for ventilators and other medical machinery. We need to start mass-producing cocktails of antivirals such as remdesivir and old-school antimalarial chloroquine (and any other drugs that appear promising) while we conduct clinical trials testing whether they work beyond the laboratory. A planning system should be implemented to (1) force companies to produce the needed ventilators and personal protection equipment required by health care workers and (2) prioritize allocation to places with the greatest needs.
If only this was possible and had been done in India, in Brazil and other places where the Pandemic killed off hundreds of thousands if not more!
And, they ask
Other than describing the wild food market in the typical orientalism, little effort has been expended on the most obvious of questions. How did the exotic food sector arrive at a standing where it could sell its wares alongside more traditional livestock in the largest market in Wuhan?
Because:
The overlapping economic geography extends back from the Wuhan market to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness.
COVID19 is not the first virus to jump from animals to humans and, this point is made by The Permanent Pandemic , too. These are zoonotic viruses. Malaria , although it's been around for centuries, is one. Ebola is one.
And, so:
If by its global expansion alone, commodity agriculture serves as both propulsion for and nexus through which pathogens of diverse origins migrate from the most remote reservoirs to the most international of population centers. It is here, and along the way, where novel pathogens infiltrate agriculture’s gated communities. The lengthier the associated supply chains and the greater the extent of adjunct deforestation, the more diverse (and exotic) the zoonotic pathogens that enter the food chain. Among recent emergent and reemergent farm and foodborne pathogens, originating from across the anthropogenic domain, are African swine fever, Campylobacter, Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Ebola Reston, E. coli O157:H7, foot-and-mouth disease, hepatitis E, Listeria, Nipah virus, Q fever, Salmonella, Vibrio, Yersinia, and a variety of novel influenza variants, including H1N1 (2009), H1N2v, H3N2v, H5N1, H5N2, H5Nx, H6N1, H7N1, H7N3, H7N7, H7N9, and H9N2.
The conclusions are of course, radical. We have to re-order our economies and societies, our social relations. We have to go back to a less exploitative system.
I love their last paragraph:
The way out is nothing short of birthing a world (or perhaps more along the lines of returning back to Earth). It will also help solve—sleeves rolled up—many of our most pressing problems. None of us stuck in our living rooms from New York to Beijing, or, worse, mourning our dead, want to go through such an outbreak again. Yes, infectious diseases, for most of human history our greatest source of premature mortality, will remain a threat. But given the bestiary of pathogens now in circulation, the worst spilling over now almost annually, we are likely facing another deadly pandemic in far shorter time than the hundred-year lull since 1918. Can we fundamentally adjust the modes by which we appropriate nature and arrive at more of a truce with these infections?
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